Sunday, August 12, 2012

"Male Couples Face Pressure to Fill Cradles" NYTimes 8/9/12

WASHINGTON — When the jubilant couple were wed in June, they exchanged
personalized vows and titanium rings, cheered the heartfelt toasts and
danced themselves breathless. Then, as the evening was winding down,
unexpected questions started popping up.

One after another, their guests began asking: Are you going to have kids? When are you going to have kids?

Tom Lotito and Matt Hay, both 26, could not help but feel moved. They
never imagined as teenagers that they would ever get married, much less
that friends and family members would pester them about having children.

“It’s another way that I feel like what we have is valid in the eyes of
other people,” said Mr. Hay, who married Mr. Lotito in June before 133
guests.

As lawmakers and courts expand the legal definition of the American
family, same-sex couples are beginning to feel the same
what-about-children pressure that heterosexual twosomes have long felt.

For some couples, it is another welcome sign of their increasing
inclusion in the American mainstream. But for others, who hear the
persistent questions at the office, dinner parties and family
get-togethers, the matter can be far more complicated.

Many gay men had resigned themselves to the idea that they would never
be accepted by society as loving parents and assumed they would never
have children. They grieved that loss and moved on, even as other gay
men and lesbians fully embraced childless lives. So the questions can
unearth bittersweet feelings and cause deep divisions within a couple
over whether to have children at all, now that parenting among same-sex
couples is becoming more common.

The process can be also daunting logistically and financially, as
would-be parents wrestle with whether to adopt or use a surrogate. And
once they have children, many same-sex couples still endure the
inevitable criticism — spoken or unspoken — from those who remain
uncomfortable with the notion of their being parents.

But support for same-sex parents is growing steadily among Americans. A
Pew Research Center survey conducted in July and released last week
found for the first time that a majority of people surveyed — 52 percent
— said that gay men and lesbians should be allowed to adopt children,
up from 46 percent in 2008 and 38 percent in 1999.

The shift in public opinion and the simple question — Are you having
children? — is nothing short of a marvel to some gay men, perhaps even
more so than to lesbians, for whom giving birth has always been an
option.

Greg Moore, 62, a retired corporate manager in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.,
shakes his head with wonder when he sees young male couples chattering
about their toddlers. That possibility seemed hopelessly out of reach
when he and his 74-year-old husband, who have been together for 44 years
and married in 2008, dreamed of having children. “Gay people didn’t
have kids,” he said wistfully. “Straight people had kids.”

Popular culture is helping rewrite that script. Gay men who have
children, or are considering having children, are becoming increasingly
visible on network television. In “Modern Family,”
the nation’s most popular television show, the couple Mitchell and
Cameron considered adopting a second child this past season. In “Scandal,”
a new ABC series, a middle-aged White House staff member groused about
his partner’s desire to adopt a baby from Ethiopia. And this fall, a new
NBC sitcom called “The New Normal” will feature a gay couple and their surrogate.

The shift is also reflected in census data. Between 2000 and 2010, among
same-sex couples raising children, the percentage of couples with
adopted children increased to 20 percent from 9 percent, according to an
analysis by Gary Gates, a demographer at the Williams Institute at the
University of California, Los Angeles. (Most same-sex couples with
adopted children are lesbians, but gay men make up a growing share,
accounting for nearly a third of such couples in 2010, up from a fifth
in 2000.)

“The definition of family is unquestionably evolving,” Dr. Gates said.

But he also noted that many Americans remain deeply opposed to gay
parents raising children. Same-sex couples are explicitly prohibited
from adopting in two states — Utah and Mississippi — and they face
significant legal hurdles in about half of all other states,
particularly because they cannot legally marry in those states. And some
religious leaders have refused to provide adoption services to gay
couples.

Roman Catholic bishops in Washington, D.C., Illinois and Massachusetts
have shuttered adoption services rather than comply with requirements
that they consider same-sex couples as adoptive parents.

As a result, even in Democratic strongholds like Washington, some gay
men keep their dreams of having children mostly to themselves.

But for Jeff Krehely, 35, who has been married for six years, there is
no escaping the question in his social circles. His friends ask. His
colleagues ask. His parents are so eager that they have taken to sending
birthday cards to his two cats (they call them the “grandkitties”).

On the Fourth of July, when Mr. Krehely and his husband sipped iced
coffee with several other gay couples, he knew it was only a matter of
time before the subject came up. Three of the five couples said they
were seriously considering adopting.

“Everyone’s asking: What’s your timetable? What’s your plan?” said Mr.
Krehely, a policy analyst, who is still weighing whether to take the
plunge.

But some gay men who have no plans to have children view the shift as
something of a mixed blessing. On one hand, they welcome the sense of
inclusion that comes with always being asked about children. On the
other hand, they are always being asked about children.

Rudolph Chandler, 57, and George Walker, 43, who married in 2010,
thought long and hard before they decided against having children. They
say they greatly admire their friends who are parents. But these days,
they are asked so often about their child-rearing plans that they roll
their eyes oh-so-subtly when it comes up. “It’s irritating, tiring,”
said Mr. Chandler, a health economist.

John Corvino, 43, chairman of the philosophy department at Wayne State
University in Detroit, has even come up with a standard response that he
leavens with a dash of humor when asked if he wants children: “To
shovel the snow and mow the lawn, sure,” he says. “Beyond that, no.”

As for Mr. Lotito and Mr. Hay, the couple who married in June, in North
Bethesda, Md., they said they were taken aback by the inquiries about
children on their big night. “I was kind of like, ‘The wedding’s still
going on, guys,’ ” Mr. Lotito said. “It’s flattering, but that’s really
not on my radar.”

Mr. Lotito, who handles contracts for a federal agency, said he has
never really wanted children. Mr. Hay is an elementary school music
teacher. “He has like 800 children a week,” Mr. Lotito said. “It’s nice
not to have them when he comes home.”

That has not deterred friends and relatives from continuing to ask. Mr.
Lotito’s mother, Lisa Sanno, who dreams of grandchildren and asked about
them (yet again) at the wedding, has been thinking about all the
options.

At the moment, she is enamored with the idea of a surrogate who might
give her son and son-in-law each a biological child. “They’re young,”
said Ms. Sanno, ever the optimist. “Maybe they’ll change their minds.”

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